Apply Murphy’s law to everything that you use today or are going to use in a few years from now. Imagine the worst consequences. And imagine being helpless in the face of those. That’s Black Mirror for you.

I have been binge watching this series I had not even heard of till a couple of weeks back. Now that I have finished all the episodes that has aired, I finally can write about it and ask you to watch if you have not already.

Is Black Mirror set in the future? The answer would be no. Black Mirror is the present. It is just the present that is waiting to happen.

Is Black Mirror too dark? Yes. But no. It is dark because there is no wishful thinking. It is quite accurate on what would be the reality if we do not look ourselves in the mirror and change the way things are headed.

The possibilities with technology are endless. And so are the dangers. And the problem with today’s technology is that the consequences are far too big and far reaching. If a steam engine exploded, maybe that would affect people in the radius of say 2 kilometers? But imagine something terrible happening to electricity? Our lives would be in ruins within days.

Internet is incredibly powerful. That is why I condemn any effort to restrict access to it. But that does not come without problems. Internet can touch lives remotely (spooky action at a distance, huh?). It opens us up to a large number of new vulnerabilities, attack vectors. We have to secure ourselves from these. We have to identify the possibilities and proactively prevent innocent people getting harmed. We have to think in ways we have never thought before. Our society needs to advance faster than our science is.

If we stall. If we sleep like the rabbit in the race with the turtle. We are doomed. And Black Mirror is just a “friendly” reminder of that.